


Goes Without Saying

by Accidentallytechohazardous



Series: Apartmentsquad [3]
Category: Bleach
Genre: Alternate Universe - Human, Angst with a Happy Ending, Domestic, Insecurity, M/M, Threesome - M/M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-24
Updated: 2014-02-24
Packaged: 2018-01-13 14:22:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,003
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1229722
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Accidentallytechohazardous/pseuds/Accidentallytechohazardous
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The reason threesomes tend to be avoided isn’t just because of conservative stuck-ups who gape at the idea of something even remotely sexually creative. It’s also because polyamorous relationships are hard work, they take so much careful construction, and people are so rarely careful in how they treat one another.</p><p>Sometimes, maybe not all the time, but sometimes, the balance tilts. Someone ends up lonely, neglected, perhaps even hurt?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Goes Without Saying

In the end, maybe Izuru should have just stuck to keeping fish. If he was really ambitious, perhaps one day he’d move up to owning a few cats, but only when he’s really ready for it and not until his he’s sure the fish are comfortable with the potential situation.

 

One cat will be ginger and fluffy and meow at odd hours of the night to wake him up. It will scratch up the couch and shed every-fucking-where and leave its gross, dirty socks on the floor. The other one will be black and knock things off tabletops. It will jump on him at inconvenient times and paw at the door to be let out every single time Izuru finally settles in and sits down, because it just has to indulge in some crazy sudden impulse it has and damned the peace of mind of anyone in its way.. It will be almost exactly like the life he lives now, except there will be more space in the bed.

 

But instead of having two cats at his feet, Izuru is sandwiched between the slumbering figures of Shuuhei and Renji. He can’t sleep. He figures he’ll have a cigarette instead. It’s unlikely to do anything to help his lack of rest, but as long as he’s not going to get any sleep anyways he wants to do something with his hands.

 

His feet dangle off the side of the bed, toeing the floor. His cigarette is locked between the knobby knuckles of fingers and the glow of the cinders is the only light in the room. He balances the stick between his lips and blows smoke through his nostrils like smokestacks. Izuru is the only one awake at this hour. Renji and Shuuhei almost never wake up this late unless its because Izuru’s restlessness is disturbing them and they snap at him to go to sleep.

 

When they do, their voices seem to boom in the silent room and makes Izuru jolt. And then he feels stupid for being so surprised. How could someone just forget that their actions might affect someone? How does one forget they’re alongside living, breathing people? It seems absurd.

 

“Living” is a word Izuru wouldn’t use lightly. He knows the literal definition, if you absolutely must nit-pick him about this, but he much prefers the abstract connotation. It fascinates him, that there can be a greater meaning to being “alive” than just fulfilling biological functions. The poet in him sees the beauty in that, in the things in the inbetween spaces of emotions that can’t be explained.

 

They make Izuru feel “alive”. The way Renji smiles at him, not a cocky grin or a sneer, but the way he smiles when he thinks Izuru isn’t looking, smaller and tight-lipped and glancing at him out of the corner of his eye like he never wants to look away. The way Shuuhei brushes Izuru’s bangs out of his face and tucks them behind his ear, as if Izuru is so complicated that this small gesture can reveal an entirely different part of him, as if Shuuhei can look at him and see and accept limitless complexities.

 

Shuuhei and Renji are alive. They know how to “live”. Izuru has been studying it for quite some time. He thinks if he had to try and sum up what their lives are, an example of their aliveness would be those times when Izuru comes home late from work, tired and with the imagined feeling of blood still cling to his fingers. And there they are, already halfway through dinner, and they turn to him with matching beams like Izuru coming home is this exciting and fascinating event. Their happiness is as blinding as a newborn star.

 

And sometimes Izuru just has to look away, or else he thinks the sheer force of it might burn him up.

 

And he’s seen them, the way Renji and Shuuhei look at each other, the way they look at him. One glance and you can just tell these are people who know how feel things with their whole heart. They’re the kind of people who can look at a situation and on a good day they’ll go “Maybe nothing bad will happen this time”. Izuru, on the other hand, lost this ability some number of years ago. It went out like a lightbulb with a short fuse, and what he got in exchange was a handful of doubts that maybe, just maybe, he’s already felt everything he was allowed to feel. As if every person is assigned a number of highs and lows, until their feelings even out and they can’t reach those precipices anymore. And Izuru wasted all his highs and lows too early in life, on silly crushes and flightless hopes, and everything he experiences after that is on mute. Hardly in his mid-twenties, and Izuru has already outlived his own life.

 

When Izuru looks in the mirror, he doesn’t see the burning heat or the hot intensity of Shuuhei and Renji’s “aliveness”. Sometimes, instead, he sees shocking pallidness, eyes cold like frostbitten fingers and the dark sides of planets.

 

He wonders what it’s like to be a person like them who has to look at a person like him every single day. He wonders if they’ve ever resented it.

 

He sits between two pairs of feet, clad only in his boxers and not even caring as the cold night air seems to slip under his skin and seep into his bones. He tucks his bangs back behind his ear, but they slip out anyways. He rolls the cigarette between his knuckles and watches smoke drift up towards the ceiling. Renji and Shuuhei are motionless except for the gentle rising and falling of their chests. Izuru waits for his cigarette to burn down to the butt before flicking it into the ashtray on their bedside table, just a few inches from where Shuuhei’s wrist just barely dangles off the mattress. Izuru would sink his fingers into the two of them like a man falling into a grave.

 

—

 

So it goes a little something like this.

 

Renji wakes up very late one weekend morning. This is because he was up deep into the hours of the exciting world of Karakura after dark, distributing pizzas and getting yelled at by strangers because he’s fifteen minutes late in the fifteen degree weather on the ice-laden streets behind a solid chunk of traffic that Renji could have fucking rode his bike past if it wasn’t so fucking cold and ice-laden outside.

 

He wakes up and wraps himself in a hoodie and the comforter, dragging the latter behind his body as he stumbles out of the bedroom. He can smell a fresh pot of coffee, courtesy of Shuuhei. He can hear Izuru’s morning news show on, babbling away about their weekly bird-watch segment.

 

When Renji makes it to the living room, he’s actually surprised he isn’t greeted right away, as that has been their routine for quite some time. Renji usually wakes up the last, and by the time he manages to pull himself together and get his morning started, the other two are already caffeinated and fed. Such is the glamor of the delivery boy industry.

 

But this time he doesn’t hear his name. No one even turns around to look at him. He goes unnoticed because there, sitting on the couch, Shuuhei and Izuru are watching tv with their arms wrapped around one another. Shuuhei leans over and mutters something to Izuru that Renji can’t hear, and Izuru snorts before burying his head in the nook between Shuuhei’s chin and his shoulder. The two of them fit together like two halves of the same photograph, as if the universe spun into creation with the exact intentions that they should end up in this very spot on this very couch, together.

 

And suddenly Renji wants to go far, far away from this place. He wants to unsee that scene, rip it straight from his brain. He wants to stomp down this sudden spark of hate like he’s stomped down so many things before, and remember that this is no different than every other double thats tried to nag at his mind.

 

It’s not like this is some kind of shiny, new ephiphany Renji’s had. He knew- almost from the beginning- that Shuuhei and Izuru are a dual set. The two of them made that choice themselves, they sealed that promise in an uncountable number of kisses back when Renji was still wondering why he couldn’t just make himself fall in love with people who weren’t Shuuhei and Izuru.

 

And the two of them feel so right together. Izuru puts together words that invoke things, that lay out a map of macabre and melancholy in his haunting voice and its beautiful. Shuuhei puts his whole heart into what he’s feeling, he says what he’s thinking and that makes his words powerful. They seemed to have this power, this trick of the mind, to see things that other people can’t see. They are the people who put together the puzzle pieces of the universe, they see beauty where beauty is hidden, and they see strength in sadness.

 

Renji can’t see that strength. Where Shuuhei and Izuru see passion in sorrow, and wisdom in misery, Renji gets uncomfortable and has to turns his head away. Sadness is too poignant for his pallet, it makes him feel things he doesn’t want to feel. It turns his stomach sour and roars in his brain like static and weighs his body down like iron chains. He doesn’t have the poise that they do to bridle his emotions. When he tries, the feelings just poison him from the inside out like a virus and all he can do is try to purge them out, just get this sickness over with and throw back up everything he’s taken in and if it makes him look like an immature child, screaming and expelling these rotten thoughts and doubts, well, then that’s just a part of the healing process.

 

And it would be a fair fucking irony that this would end up being the thing that divides the three of them. He hates the idea that they might know the reason he can’t look at the world from their view is because he’s too fragile, too messy inside to handle reality in its cruelest, rawest form. They could look at the weakest parts of him, the parts that make him feel cowardly and stupid, and they would know he’s not worth their time, not when they have each other. Shuuhei and Izuru could wrap themselves in each other like security blankets and tell Renji “Our mistake. We don’t need you after all. Thanks for wasting years of our lives we’ll never get back. Please get out and never come back.” and it would make perfect sense in the world.

 

What would he even do at that point, when he had been dismissed and told to pack his bags? He can’t fathom it. As stupid and pathetic as it sounds, trying to imagine his life without Izuru and Shuuhei in it is like trying to ask him to understand the vastness of space or the edge of the universe. It’s simply too frightening of a concept to broach. They’ve been there for most of his life, leading up to the moment when he would decide to just accept that he could love these two very specific people equally with a truly gut-wrenching, humiliating level of affection. He wouldn’t know where to even begin, if he could begin at all. He wants them. He wants them to want him. He wants their touches and their voices and their faces. He doesn’t care what they think of him, really, its not important as long as he can just keep them. 

 

And maybe they’d be happier without him. Maybe Shuuhei and Izuru were just meant for each other and Renji was selfish to try and take a share of that away from them. Even so, he wonders if its possible to love two people so much you can’t do the right thing for them, and that’s why he can’t bare the thought of leaving.

 

—

 

Shuuhei feels like bad luck. He’s a jinx. People don’t come looking for him, he just wanders into their life like a walking taboo.

 

He doesn’t really know how to explain it, and he doesn’t particularly want to. Izuru told him once that he gets too invested in other people’s problems. Renji said that he obsesses over things he can’t control.

 

But see, the thing is that he feels like he should have been able to control this. Like it’s just possible that he should have done a better job, as a boyfriend, as a friend, just as a human being. If you love someone, you’re supposed to help them, protect them. Maybe Shuuhei gave up too easily, or didn’t try hard enough, and thats why they’re where they’re at now.

 

He knew them before they became the people they are now. He knew Izuru when he was still a cheerful little kid, round-faced, open-minding, and almost alarmingly bright. And by the time Shuuhei was just beginning to get close to him Izuru was already drifting away from that. It felt like he barely had the time to put his hand on Izuru’s shoulder before he was already an adult so different from himself as a child, he grew up far too fast. He watched Izuru grow into someone sad, someone jagged around the edges as if you could cut your hand on them.

 

Shuuhei knew Renji when he was excited about life, saw unlimited possibilities as long as he did his best. And somewhere along the way, as Renji’s life kept taking wrong turns and hitting rough patches, blockaded at every turn and for some reason just not able to bounce back as strongly anymore, Shuuhei watches Renji lose his steam. Shuuhei saw him turn angry and tired, and he began gathering moments in which Renji’s eyes went dark and hollow, a look like a vacuum without heat and light or like photographs of small children living in cardboard boxes on the streets.

 

For all that, he still loves them.

 

Shuuhei knows how to hold them, card his fingers through their hair until its better. Knows that even if he can’t turn back the years, they can still all be happy.

 

But sometimes, when he’s not careful, one nagging, insignificant thought worms its way out of his mind and almost makes it past his lips. A split second in which he might accidentally lean in really close between Renji and Izuru and whisper in their ears “You’ll be fine, as long as you stay with me.”

 

The rational part of him knows this isn’t true. Hell, all of him know it’s not true. Just because Izuru and Renji aren’t the happy little children they used to be, it doesn’t mean they’re completely dysfunctional. They don’t need a babysitter, they can do fine on their own. So why does Shuuhei have these moments where he feels like he needs, more than anything else in the world, for them to need him?

 

“Probably,” The voice that sounds like the same other insignificant thought from before says, “Because you need them more. You just don't want them to see it.”

 

Shuuhei doesn’t know how to trust himself when that thought pops up. The lines of reality seem to blur together and he can’t tell what’s real and what’s not. Maybe he was wrong from the beginning, and Izuru and Renji aren’t the ones that need to be taken care of. Not when Shuuhei can sit here and fawn over the memories of comforting them, as if those are the most important times he can have. He cradles those moments without knowing it, cherishing the times in which the most important person in either of their worlds, the person who they can rely on more than anyone, is him.

 

Maybe he can make up for that, though. This desire to be needed, and to feed off other people’s need. It might not exactly be a need, Shuuhei’s desire to wake up to the tangle of his and Izuru’s legs together in bed, or his hunger for the way Renji sometimes holds his hand without being asked. He doesn’t require those like his lungs gasp for oxygen and his stomach demands food. But on the other hand, without those, the world would be tilted, spun incorrectly on its axis so everything is on its side and everything is wrong.

 

So really, you can say he doesn’t exactly "need" them, as much as he just feels like a reality without them just isn’t physically possible. It's like imagining a universe without a sun in the sky, without air to breathe, without any kind of love whatsoever. He is entitled, because at some point the orbit of his world shifted ever so slightly to revolve around theirs and its been spinning that way ever since.

 

—

 

The problem, there-in, is that people don’t always see each other or even themselves the way they really are. And yet at the same time this doesn’t mean they are completely incorrect, you see? The personal accounts of individuals can be attributed to little more than their personal insecurities and fears, the unique perspective that either drives them forward or holds them back.

 

However, its an unavoidable fact of life that people cannot be perfect, they simply weren’t designed for such a function. They are not made of glass, people are meant to be hurt and healed and each experience is a trial and error. And if you try enough and err enough and still try, and if you have two hands that can hold the hands of two others, there’s no reason you can’t keep the balance. Give it time, and they will learn. They will thrive. They will love.


End file.
